Population shifts can be linked to '65 act

WASHINGTON -- Forty years ago, Sen. Ted Kennedy made some famous comments about immigration control that rival those of Neville Chamberlain, predicting "peace in our time" on the eve of the Second World War.
When the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 was passed, the always-cocksure "Teddy," one of the most perfervid supporters of "new egalitarianism," told the Congress: "First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Second, the ethnic mix will not be upset ..."
Now, on the 40th anniversary of the bill that transformed America -- with millions of immigrants annually and an ethnic mix that has been set on its head -- it is appropriate that some groups should look at what that important 1965 bill has wrought.
"The U.S. added at least 40 million immigrants after 1965," Steven Gillon, a historian and dean of the Honors College at the University of Oklahoma, told the annual Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) meeting here last weekend. "Before 1965, 95 percent of the new immigrants had come from Europe. After 1965, 95 percent came from the Third World. The 1965 act has transformed American society and had consequences exactly the opposite of what we were promised."
Irony
At this point in the meeting, lending artistic irony, a film was shown of an interview with Norbert Schlei, one of the drafters of the bill in the attorney general's office at that time. "We believed the bill would have negligible effects on the United States," he said. "We predicted 165,000 immigrants a year. We believed that the idea that tinkering with immigration would make any difference was just silly." Then he smiled -- a big, wholly unapologetic smile. "It surely didn't turn out that way," he summed up.
How nice of him to say so! What the bill did was to take quotas away from mostly Europeans (until then, immigrants were taken according to their percentage of the American people) and open immigration to Asia and the rest of the Third World. It provided for the noble-sounding but disastrous "family reunification," by which immigrants could bring virtually any family member here.
It was so "successful" -- in its non-intent -- that analysts at the FAIR meeting predicted that by 2050, America will have a population of approximately 436 million and, for the first time, the largest "minority" of the population will be non-Hispanic whites -- exactly the people who originally populated and founded America.
Other specialists, like the prescient political economist and author Pat Choate, convincingly developed the idea that along with the massive immigration over the last 40 years, the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which was supposed only to accelerate trade between the two Americas, has "released corporate America from its stakeholder responsibilities within the U.S. Today its only responsibility is to shareholders, not to workers."
'In-sourcing'
And Doug McIntyre, popular host of Talk Radio 790 in Los Angeles, said it even more clearly: "We have allowed Third World labor to set the standards for American workers. What we have is 'in-sourcing' -- bringing in cheap labor -- Darwinian capitalism -- the belief that the U.S. is just a market.
"A nation that does not control its borders," he concluded, "is a nation in name only."
Two-third of Americans say consistently, in polls and surveys, that they want to reduce immigration. Their voices are becoming rightly impatient. Only about one-tenth of Americans want to increase it -- but these include most corporations (cheap labor), most members of Congress (more constituents or just plain indifference) and Hollywood (utopian romanticism). It is an ingrown marriage of far right and far left, who tend to agree only on this topic.
Of course, there is a lot of talk -- from the White House as well as Congress -- about controlling immigration. There are currently three bills before Congress, two of which would only bring more illegals here through "guest worker" programs that would easily become permanent.
But it is doubtful now that any of them will pass (probably blessedly so). The Washington Times reported last Monday that new and salacious scandals (sex for green cards was one of the accusations) are being outlined to congressional committees about the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (CIS). It's clear that the service does not have the capacity to oversee any guest worker program.
Universal Press Syndicate